Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss the emerging battle between SAP and Salesforce to lead the AI agent market.
Highlights
00:39 — Data clouds are emerging to power AI tools and solution. I’m analyzing the revenue of SAP and Salesforce (SAP annual revenue is $36.2 billion and Salesforce’s annual report next week is expected to show annual revenue of about $37.9 billion), and the shift in focus from applications to data, clouds, and AI. Other major players like Oracle, Workday, and Microsoft are competing here and each will be a major force, but SAP and Salesforce are the key drivers.
AI Agent & Copilot Summit is an AI-first event to define opportunities, impact, and outcomes with Microsoft Copilot and agents. Building on its 2025 success, the 2026 event takes place March 16-18 in San Diego. Get more details.
02:07 — SAP and Salesforce have pivoted away from a focus on applications to emphasize data, clouds, and AI. That’s important to generate, refine, and optimize data to feed into AI systems and agents. Data clouds harmonize data from various vendors but are being defined differently by the vendors and have different limitations.
03:27 — Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s recent statements about Salesforce’s Agent Force, which has gained thousands of paying customers, includes the concept of digital labor and its potential to address talent constraints. Benioff’s vision is that of digital labor as a limitless resource, along with the rapid adoption of agents in the workforce.
04:40 — We’re experiencing an ongoing evolution of data clouds and agents and their role in shaping the future of enterprise applications.
